"He's not dead. Not yet." Her dark brown eyes were bright with smirking hellfire. Although the sphinx loomed over Suvani, the Queen of Alsantia managed to look down her nose in a condescending sneer, fixing her eyes arbitrarily on some furry spot of its lion forequarters, as if she could riddle eye holes wherever she wished, finding the fearful adulation she craved even in the contempt of a riddling sphinx.
"Can you torment one not in his own skin?" The resonant roar boomed in the deserted menagerie. Not that the Queen's zoo was abandoned by its inhabitants; the Queen had laid waste to her collection, starting with the mice. Blue flames and fumes had poured upward from her snapping fingers
like an inverted teardrop, which she lobbed down the gate of their cage-city, chasing a scurrying, chittering wave of mice through the hole they had gnawed through the floor.
While Gandra had spied this secret exit, the Queen had allowed it, knowing they would remain her prisoners, for mere mice could not burrow under the deep foundation her grandfather had laid on a stony mountain shelf, unless the mouthy rodents consigned the next five generations of mice to the toil of endless tunneling, conspired with dwarves, or risked the halls and roads of her castle and kingdom, which she had made unsympathetic to talking animals, save for her sworn killers.
Even now, Gandra, the Queen's animal keeper, swept the unicorn stall, pushing out clumps of shaggy hair, shavings of horn where the dumb beast had ground her constantly growing horn against the bars, and the foul refuse that served as the final reminders of the unicorn. Well, aside from the aftertaste. After Gandra had led off the fatted unicorns one by one, the sphinx had dined that night on unicorn steaks with a raging appetite, for it had been far too long since she had slated her craving for freshly killed flesh. Only one thing was more indfferent and omnivorous than her appetite, the curiosity she indignantly turned on the teenage tyrant.
"That's ingratitude for you," Suvani sniffed. "Remember, I saved him." Having tossed Oji into the mouse habitat welded from cages into a steel mockery of a scratching post, she had then reached in the ginger kitten's dangling cage, extracting the pierced, bloody mouse into which she had shape-shifted the griffin.
The sphinx glared at Suvani, and suppressed her urge to pounce. Strictly speaking, the sphinx had sworn not to harm the Queen, but her eyes widened and her nostrils flared, waiting, as she often did, for any opportunities to aggravate an accident. While the sphinx did not love the misery of the griffin's sharp, sparring tongue, she enjoyed his company, having come to think of themselves as like minds, prisoners not only of Suvani, but of the words through which both thought and spoke obliquely.
"Why does a butcher save a body?" growled the sphinx, dropping to her belly so that she could glare back in the Queen's brazen eyes.
"Why does a dog worry a bone?" Suvani tittered. "Regardless of how you obfuscate it, you clever creature, it's plain how we feel about each other. If I'm proud of you, it's only the admiration one killer feels for another, mixed with the contentment a collector derives from an enviable acquisition. "
"Need the smug speak, when satisfaction so vile scars the soul?"
"That's no riddle." Suvani tapped one finger to her chin. "You're fooling yourself. Or a born fool, like your friend, only better at disguising your rhetoric."
"What does it think it is?" The grousing sphinx rubbed absent-minndedly against her cage, rocking it back and forth. The cage was there for show, and both the sphinx and Suvani knew it.
"Only a symbol of your captivity," sighed the Queen wearily. "As I could not confine a mighty sphinx by so flimsy a contrivance, you are a prisoner of your word."
"Was I speaking of the cage?" sneered the sphinx.
When Suvani's eyes narrowed, the sphinx buried her head in her paws, hoping to seem brooding and wounded, for the Queen would not live down even such a petty slight, and the sphinx felt so smug
that her satisfaction was surely graven on her face. While she had once doubted Suvani would test her honor to the point of death, the Queen was an all or nothing person, who, having liquidated her collection down to the griffin and the sphinx, wouldn't be contented until she had dispensed with the whole lot. No doubt she had saved the sphinx for last, knowing it would only take one stray, spiteful word to end the sphinx, to whom words were a powerful law that must be writ large in her sight.
"You haven't asked the most important question," said Suvani.
"Is it a riddle?" murmured the sphinx.
"What do I want? Why am I here?"
"Is it a philosopher?" The sphinx lazily lifted her head to bestow an arch look upon the Queen.
"Very droll," she sniffed. "What do you want most, monster?"
"What is both priceless and free?" asked the sphinx.
"There are so many answers." She seemed to ponder. "Water. Air. Light. Love. But the common denominator to them all is freedom."
The sphinx nodded.
"Like you, monster," said the Queen. "I'm insatiably curious. My mind is always roaming. Unlike you, I'm not satisfied to brood in riddles, hatch answers, and not push them out of the nest. And what do I want most?"
"Is it an echo?" growled the sphinx.
"If I dare repeat myself," said the Queen, "it's only to demonstrate my point. What I want most is to make an impression. To cow the disloyal, terrify the seditious, and, in short, be my own banner."
"Dare a queen become a symbol?"
"I'm not out to be a martyr, if that's what you mean."
"Can a martyr be so reviled?" said the sphinx.
"Allow me to worry about my own skin, and you save yours and your friend's."
"Are traitors ever free?" asked the sphinx.
"Do you presume to dub yourself a loyal Alsantian? You barely acknowledged Oji when he was here." The Queen's lip curled, and her nostrils flared, fanning her snicker into a mad titter.
The sphinx rose to her feet, paced the cage, and darted steely glares at Suvani.
"Besides," said the Queen, "you'll mainly be there for show."
"Am I a monster or a parade animal?"
"You don't really want me to answer that, but yes, I want to ride you." While the sphinx glowered intensely, Suvani 's face, in contemplation of revenge, lit up with rapture. "Will you do it?"
"Am I a fool?" The sphinx sighed, then nodded.
"If you don't want to do this, you need only hew to the terms of our original bet," said the Queen. "Tell me your name."
In their riddle game, Suvani had bet herself, to become the sphinx's next meal, while the sphinx anted up her freedom. Having won, the Queen offered to settle for the sphinx's name instead, but the sphinx demured, knowing that true names were the reins by which witches owned someone not only in body and soul, but in will, memory, and shape. Without her name on Suvani's lips, she might be burned, stabbed, or enslaved by magical effects, but not altered. Unwilling to subject her true self, and unable to renege for the sake of her honor, the sphinx had accepted the loss, and began her servitude to the vile sorceress. But when Suvani taunted and tantalized her with freedom in exchange for her name,
the sphinx would only knot her riddling tongue and sit as silent as the proverbial sphinx.
"No?" teased Suvani. "What's in a name?"
The sphinx buried her head in her paws.
"You'll have to sink a little lower," said Suvani. At a wave of her hand, the cage dissolved into mist, and she walked around the sulking, mountainous sphinx looking for a path of ascent. <
The sphinx's eyes flattened to slits. With a mischievous grin, she hunched forward, bobbed her head, clamped Suvani in her jaws, and with a toss of her neck, flicked the Queen onto her back.
While Suvani's robes were now disheveled, and her hair was pasted up in a smear from the sphinx's huge, wet lips, accenting her wickedness with a touch of madness, she seemed to take the slight in stride, if not in good humor. "If you should think of yielding to your baser instincts, know that your friend—no doubt your only friend in the world—is yet in my clutches."
If the sphinx deigned to answer, it was drowned out in her mighty roar.
"If there was a god in Alsantia," said Suvani, "he would not have made sphinxes so honorable."
"Where do wicked hearts fly?" growled the Sphinx. "Where do Queens fall?"
"It had better be a safer landing than that," said Suvani. "We're going to Teriana."
"What is a fitting memento for a petty tyrant?"
"Petty?" Suvani's tone rose to unbridled outrage. "I'm anything but petty, you mannish cat!"
"Why is it always about you?" Lashing out her claw, the growling sphinx caught Gandra completely unaware, snagging the menagerie keeper's robes, yanking her down, and dragging her through unicorn spoor, before turning her hindquarters on the vile old woman.
"What are you doing?" asked Suvani incredulously.
"What is the daily business of the living?" the sphinx snickered, vented a satisfied sigh, then, having lightened herself of a load a quarter the size of Gandra, trotted for the doors. "How might I silence a queen?"
Gandra howled. "You fowl monstrosity!"
***
Queen Suvani having made a clean sweep of her menagerie, and the sphinx having befouled Gandra to ease the memory of her jailer's petty torments, they rushed into the skies, clearing spires and battlements so narrowly that one sentinel ducked under the sphinx's heavy paws.
"Why stop with Gandra?" said Suvani cheerily, "I've never liked that one either. How do you think he earned that assignment?
"A lofty viewpoint does not make a penthouse," the voice piped from the fluttering folds of Suvani's gown, "nor the odor of cheese a mouse."
While the sphinx delighted in the griffin's squeak, she dared not laugh, knowing the thin skin and deep claws of the teenage queen.
"What was that rank squeal?" While the Queen feigned innocence, her lip curled in indignant ire. "Did you break wind?"
"What cleaves the sky but suffers a crown?" the sphinx asked, then fell silent, despite the Queen's attempts to prolong the exchange with veiled threats and slights against the pocketed griffin-mouse.
As they soared over red brick sweating chimney smoke, rippling corn, wheat, alfalfa, and flax, and rivers crinkling the land, their countless tributaries swarming with rafts, barges, and boats, the sphinx relieved the monotony of the journey by contemplating whether the mouse was a griffin or the griffin was a mouse. If only the present moment was real, was the mouse's memory of being a griffin a lie?
While shape changing broke the rules of riddles in an unnerving way, they were also a fallow ground for new riddles, real puzzlers and posers that the sphinx was already composing. As surely as thieves scheme to snatch, traitors craft excuses, spies practice lies, and murderers anticipate their kills; as surely as the charitable seek out those who need their coin, the loyal think of how best to shield their friends by word or deed, and saints direct unceasing prayer, even when in doubt: the sphinx was seizing these new opportunities for riddles, as if they were not manufactured by magic, but provided by nature. Whether for good or ill, the sphinx was a riddler—not only at heart and at base, but in her nerve. Questions upwelled so spontaneously that they were more than a groping instinct, but the core of her being, finding its way with feeling Not that the sphinx was above her baser instincts; as a monster, she was more beast than any mere animal was capable of being.
Although the skies were cold, her tough hide was thick with feathers and fur. Not so Suvani, who shivered in the chill wind until she shook with warm shudders, her goosepimples hot little volcanoes on the verge of frostbite, until the sphinx descended into a warm front, defrosting the frigid witch but not cracking the sphinx's icy calm.
"Why fly so high," said Suvani, "unless to get some petty vengeance on your mistress? Are such ignoble instincts not beneath the noble sphinx?"
"Why ask when you know so much?"
"Clever beast. Why, that's one of the main theological riddles—can gods be said to think when they know all? And can that which only knows, and need never question, be alive, or have being?"
"Who is the sphinx?" The sphinx then said no more, though Suvani goaded her with questions both riddling and rhetorical. The massive creature composed its face into a mask of dead calm as it alternated between steep ascents and rapid plummets, the better to discomfit her rider, while ignoring the child queen's groaning criticism.
She didn't level out until Ghulmarque, where the deeply pocked land seemed one vast mud puddle, like an enormous boot print welling with muck and rainwater, to mark where Prince Vemulus's army had bivouaced while plundering the minuscule subject nation. In their advance, the army's muddy trail left a wake through the flax fields, like a monstrous snail, slithering, not for Ephremia as Suvani commanded, but for Teriana.
"Why make this detour, I wonder? I would very much like to know."
"Would a god throw away its eye, like wise Suvani?"
"You mean my mirror, the Albatron. I admit that was my mistake, if you want to know the truth."
"What is truth?" said the sphinx.
"I walked right into that, didn't I?" cackled Suvani.
They fell silent as they raked their heads back and forth to scour the land below, intent on puzzling out the march of Prince Vemulus's armies.
Deserters had encamped in groves and vales, and by streams, not only far behind the laggards and stragglers in the rear guard—which gradually trickled into view as they flew over the ridges and tree lines—but well beyond their line of sight. Few of those marching could spare an inch to turn around, as having fallen in on both sides of a river bank, they had litle elbow room, and held spears and shields close to their chest in this last approach toward Teriana.
To the sphinx's untrained eye, the troops hastened as fast as they could, and she guessed that the rear guard had just received word that fighting had already started for the front line.
When Suvani cleared her throat, and sat straight and regal, the sphinx's queenly burden suddenly seemed a sharpened stake. "Let's talk terms."
"What fell beast both sits and lies?" The sphinx felt the shudder of the eye roll as the teenage queen slouched and sighed. Now dead weight, the sagging youth was even more insufferable, and the sphinx only just restrained an impulse to buck Suvani.
"I presume the Queen on her throne," Suvani's put-upon and bored tone made the sphinx see red, which led to a roar more reflex than instinct. This tiny monster's human-ness was catching, grumbled the sphinx to herself, and soon I will be more second guess than forethought.
While she feared sullying not only her own treasured name, but that of all sphinxes, this odious itch must be scratched, this vexing thorn must be plucked, or she would have no relief.
"While I no doubt deserve that poetic scratch, these riddles are too easy," Suvani continued, "although I'm glad you no longer dabble in rhetoric. I cannot be persuaded, sphinx."
When the sphinx swerved deeply left, then right, Queen Suvani only clenched her legs harder,
and clutched the sphinx's wing-feathers in such a cruel, tight grip, that every upsweep made her draw a painful breath, and every downsweep was so excruciating that the small, shallow dips of her wings choked their speed to a sluggish coasting, dropping one yard for every one they flew, and they soon skimmed over the marching troops, whose thunderous footfall drowned the griffin's roars and the queen's screeching.
When the soldiers spotted the strange, slow burn of their descent, like a sluggish meteor, or the drift of an ember crumpling into ash, some turned and pointed, to be torn by whips and the cursing of sergeants. As Suvani sat upright, and relinquished her clutch on the wing-feathers, a murmur rushed through the ranks, and as one dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground, dozens followed suit, spurring such a wave of kneeling and head-scraping that the sphinx became ill at their rolling abasement, and the queen laughed.
"Why so tense, monster? Relax. It will be over soon, and you've already given so much. They'll talk about me for years." Like a new mother exhilirated and deranged by the pangs of childbirth, the queen's murmur held overtones of pride and joy, then dropped to a growl as she tightened her grip on the wing-feathers. "That said, I will be clear about my expectations. While this morning you were a caged beast, and tomorrow you might be free, for now, you're a working animal."
The sphinx growled. "Feet on the ground, wings in the air, or rump on leather; find the undignified animal."
"More of a puzzle than a riddle," sighed Suvani. "But when you're right, you're right. There are few monsters so undignified as a Queen. The things I put up with day to day—it's better that you don't know, and never learn any better. So, as already said, I will forgive your debt—provided you do exactly what I say."
At the far-off peal of brassy bugles, Suvani's satisfied smile, for a moment, cast her in a saintly glow, until that smile ignited a wicked grin, curling the corners of her mouth, and crinkling her eyes in malevolent glee.
While most usually melted under the sphinx's malevolent glare, Suvani only stared back until the monster averted her gaze. "Were you under the misapprehension that I only wanted you to ferry me here? To be clear, monster, you—we—fight today."
"When a two-faced queen goes to war, are two-headed monsters safe from the axe?"
Lingering silence swelled into an even longer moment. "I think not," she drawled, "but that's your point, isn't it? Not so much a riddle as an aphorism. Most clever, I'll admit. I grant your point. Then which is it, monster—safety or freedom?"
"Where are the safe worlds? Where are the free worlds?" As the unfamiliar and uncomfortable weight of hypocrisy settled, the sphinx sighed sadly, knowing she would do anything not to be beholden to the vile queen. Perhaps in fulfilling the changing terms of this shifting agreement, she might pervert her own obedience, and carry the Queen nearer to her doom.
"Look at that Terianan," said Suvani. "He's so fat, flab droops down both sides of his unicorn. If he farts, those poor dwarves mounted behind him are going to suffocate." In a loaded pause, hot air stirred the sphinx's mane and creeped along the nape of her neck. Then the Queen's fuming erupted into shocked, disbelieving indignation: "That's no Terianan. Those are my colors. And they aren't dwarves. What fool brought children to a battlefield?" She sniffed. "Not that I care, but they're readymade hostages." She shifted in the saddle. "Is that Cortero? Why is he going over to the Terianan line?"
While the sphinx's sharp eyes could pick out the sequins sewn into the collar of the fat man's cape, her eyes darted to the shrieking, grinding tread of gigantic metal animals: a steel wolf, with a coppery streak running through its mesh tail; a steel squirrel, polished to a silvery sheen, which roared as it reared on its hindlegs, a whimpering war unicorn clutched in each paw; a cumbrous rabbit of black iron that lumbered across the battlefield, grinding her troops into paste; and, poised over Suvani and the sphinx, the gleaming owl as bright as a crescent moon, its shimmering wings braced above like two greatswords.
When the mechanical owl dove for Suvani, it pinched only air in its wickedly sharp talons. At the Queen's whisper, the sphinx drew her wings tight to her leonine body and dropped like a stone, straightening her thick neck and bushy tail, hoping to wend so spear-straight that with some luck, Suvani might whistle away to be dashed onto the ramparts of Teriana.
"Kill that filthy traitor!" Suvani had growled, and now, moments later, it was so, with the general so pinched through that the fat leaked out with the blood and his last breath. In the other talon lay the human children. The sphinx had not known whether it was more honorable to leave them on the battlefield or take them for Suvani. No doubt the indignity of capture, and likely death, awaited them in either future.
"Where are the safe worlds?" the sphinx muttered. "Where are the free worlds?"
"You moping beast, the owl is coming back! I need your claws free, but not the rest of you." She chuckled. "Not yet. I'll take charge of the brats." When the whimpering, squirming children, half-tangled in ropes, became mice mid-air, they were flicked by an invisible hand toward Suvani, who cupped them to her chest. "Bring me the owl!"
At the absurd order, the sphinx sighed, slumped, squatted until her shadow pooled, then sprang into the sky, less flying than leaping for the owl's lustrous face. While bucking or twisting would be against the spirit of their agreement, she hoped the sudden pounce might jolt her mistress from her back—then knew, with doom-ridden certainty, that it would do no such thing.
While the massive, gleaming owl lurked in the updraft, the sphinx puffed her wings up in her highest upsweep, soared straight and true, and roared straight through the owl. Her claws, still greased by human lard, clicked and slid over its metal surface before finding purchase in the mesh joining its wings. The mechanical bird might be a wonder and a novel, the sphinx said to herself, but she was content with being a power and a truth. When her claws gouged deep, its wings drooped, its talons shivered like sprung gears, and its iron weight bore down with so much force that the sphinx only stayed aloft by a furious, fluttering drag of her wings.
"A monster should not be so gentle." Suvani's eyes crinkled in the upturn of her gleeful smile. "There's no need to baby it."
"Does the cannon mother the cannonball?" growled the sphinx.
"Oh! What a delightful idea!" While the sphinx struggled to haul the inoperative mechanical owl, Suvani giggled and snickered, as if their path of slaughter and carnage was as light as a ball of laughs. "Make a hole, you beautiful monster!"
The sphinx realized, too late, that her cunning riddle had inspired the Queen's taste for destruction. As her paws and wings were numbed by the drag of the dead clockwork,
she could only flap forward by panting lurches, a slow approach to the Terianan ramparts lit by violet fireballs, trailing embers of rose, pink, and purple, lobbed over by some unseen defender.
"Why do you wait? Make a hole, sphinx!"
As the sphinx panted, she glared at Suvani. "If saddles were nailed on, who would be cruel enough to ride?"
"What saddle? Don't give me ideas! And don't bother trying my sympathies. Your work may be hard, but think about the prize! Can't you do it from here?"
For reply, the sphinx creeped inch by inch, into the sky, sinking in each massive upsweep, but rising in each mighty downthrust, until, glancing over the Terianan gatehouse at a quick-striding machine—not unlike a chainmailed sailing ship, propped a hundred feet up on clockwork legs strutting for the other side of the wall—she shook her numb, pinched paws free from the wrecked owl, and wafted up, up, and up as it dwindled, tumbling towards the Terianan wall.
When Suvani swept her silken-sleeved arm above her head, the stars wavered like blown candles, flared like torches, then pounded blue streaks like lightning bolts. As the flung wreckage struck the gatehouse, metal crumpled, stone crumbled, the wall folded into rubble, and the quick, even pace of the striding machine carried it over the tumbling debris.
Roaring as one, the Alsantian army surged ahead in a commotion of shouting, mailed boots, galloping hooves, and weapons clashing on shields.